A technical history of Acorn Computers
13 comments
·March 10, 2025dcminter
amiga386
It would appear you can watch Chris Curry and Hermann Hauser watch Micro Men: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaonVYOTSsk -- and then have a post-viewing chat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4I2ktcWdJM
"I saw the first five minutes and had to run away, because I couldn't bear to see myself portrayed by Martin Freeman" -- Chris Curry
xyzzy3000
It's an entertaining watch, although a fair bit of dramatic licence is taken when depicting various anecdotes that would be well-known to readers of The Micro User and similar magazines of the time.
callumprentice
I purchased an Acorn Atom in 1980 (the prebuilt one - a friend opted for the self-assembly and regretted it) and I still remember the thrill of setting it up and turning it on for the first time. It feels like I didn't sleep for a week but I suppose I must have.
When you entered a line of their BASIC, it would check the line for errors. At one point, I kept getting error XX (I don't recall the actual number) and couldn't see the error in my code. Eventually figured out it meant I was out of RAM. There was only 2K and I think the 6502 took some and the screen too so there was only about 500 bytes left over. What a joy it was after I saved up for the 6K upgrade.
And then there was the local computer club presentation that ruined any chance of a public speaking career.... :)
amiga386
Ah, the delights of a page that covers 26 years of history and hasn't been updated for 21 years
I can at least say that in the meantime, RISC OS is still alive and now open, available from https://www.riscosopen.org/, and most people will know the ARM company and its architectures went from strength to strength, even if the RISC PC faded away.
dcminter
Some time when I have some spare time I must fish out a Pi and try it out - I was deeply envious of the Archimedes owner I knew back in the day!
xyzzy3000
I'm not sure what the state of Pi 5 support is, but RISC OS seems to work on the Pi 1, 2, 3 and 4.
ArcEm is a decent emulator for the Archimedes series, and RPCem is the equivalent for the RiscPC which succeeded it. OS ROM images are available from a variety of places.
For floppy disk emulation, ADFFS is what you are looking for, and some games have been released in this format with the consent of the copyright holders.
jlarcombe
Don't think Pi 5 can run 'supervisor code' (in old ARM language) in 32-bit mode, so RISC OS surely won't run. The bulk of it is written in assembler so reworking it to AArch64 would be an epic task. Probably take no longer to rewrite those bits in a higher-level language, for much of it.
westi
Some great memories here.
Somewhere in my parents attic is my RISC PC 600 and 486 Co-Processor card. Not sure if they also have the A3000 we had before that.
xyzzy3000
If possible, get the batteries removed from the motherboards - the leaks cause immense damage.
Rechargeable AA batteries in a battery holder are a sensible replacement.
If the hard drive has packed in then a SD to IDE/PATA adapter is available.
sammyteee
A good read!
I like that all the sites linked in the banner, no longer exist! https://www.mcmordie.co.uk/public/apeople.shtml
xyzzy3000
I particularly liked the tiling background, which may well have been created using Texture Garden https://texturegarden.com/ by Tim Tyler (of Repton fame, for the BBC Micro fans)
eurekabot123
[dead]
Someone will be along in a minute to tell you to watch Micro Men, an amusing and fairly accurate BBC dramatization of the Sinclair/Acorn rivalry :) but I'm here to recommend that you watch the Computer History Museum's interview with Hermann Hauser the erstwhile director of Acorn - he's very charming: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0sC3lT313Q
I'm fairly sure they've got one with Chris Curry too, but I can't spot it just now.